Since it debuted a little over a year ago, The Late Late Show With James Corden has averaged about 1.2 million viewers a night, a respectable figure that puts it solidly in the middle of the crowded world of late-night television. By comparison though, Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” segment with Adele, a 15-minute odyssey that touches on the singer’s love for the Spice Girls and Nicki Minaj, has been watched 90 million times since it was posted in January. Corden remains an up-and-comer for U.S. TV audiences, but in the viral world of YouTube, he’s already a superstar—and that’s far more crucial for his future.

Related Story

Perhaps that’s why his network, CBS, decided to cash in on the popularity of “Carpool Karaoke” with a primetime special that sliced together some of its greatest hits with new footage, including a ride with Jennifer Lopez that culminated in Corden taking her cellphone and sending a text to Leonardo DiCaprio. The crucial appeal of “Carpool Karaoke” is the same quality that’s helped popularize other late-night viral sensations, like Jimmy Fallon’s lip-sync battles or Jimmy Kimmel’s mean-tweet readings. They’re staged events with celebrities that strive for authenticity, sweeping aside the creaky sit-down chat for something that actually has the air of spontaneity, while sacrificing any attempts at satire.

Near the end of her “Carpool Karaoke” segment, J. Lo held her phone’s screen triumphantly up to the camera, astonished that Corden had the temerity to send DiCaprio a funny text. The stunt was for real—eagle-eyed reporters analyzed her buddy list to verify it—but it’s hard to know just how organic it was. Off-the-cuff moments are what make Corden’s videos seem special: Whether or not his rides are totally improvised, they feel relaxed, in contrast to the scripted banter of a typical late-night chat. The crucial moment from Adele’s segment involves her reciting a verse from Kanye West’s “Monster.” And Justin Bieber’s mellow appearance, one of the first to explode on Corden’s YouTube page (which now has more than 4 million subscribers), helped rehab the singer’s image ahead of his new album release.

A certain pre-planned quality was part of the appeal for hosts like David Letterman, who always maintained a cautious distance from his guests (all the better for gently mocking the ones he didn’t like). His was an era of snark, of healthy disrespect for fame and the beatific glow it could bestow on the lowliest celebrity. Jay Leno, slightly more of a schmoozer with his guests, was similarly irreverent in his attitude toward the American public, whom he’d mock with segments like “Jaywalking.” Corden has upended that approach too, with another viral segment where he arrives at someone’s home to deliver a pizza … often with celebrity guests in tow.

Fallon is the acknowledged master of the “celebrity buddy” genre, tapping friends old and new (from Justin Timberlake to Bruce Springsteen) to pal around on his set. There’s a collaborative feeling to his mainstay sketches (Lip Sync Battle, Wheel of Musical Impressions, Evolution of Dancing) that harkens back to his days on Saturday Night Live, where a celebrity guest host is brought in to brainstorm sketch ideas every week. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who’s far more openly indebted to Letterman, allows celebrities to embrace their meaner side by letting them clap back at rude tweets; his “Lie Witness News,” which asks invasive questions of strangers on the street, has an air of Leno’s “Jaywalking.”

Not everyone in late night is going the celeb-heavy route. Seth Meyers seems to be making a play for Jon Stewart’s audience, with his “A Closer Look” series focused on political stories. Conan O’Brien tapped into a huge new audience with his brilliant “Clueless Gamer” series, where he plays video games with staffer Aaron Bleyaert. The segments play off O’Brien’s general disinterest in gaming, using his generational malaise to his advantage. At 52, he’s now one of the oldest late-night hosts, after spending decades as one of the youngest—a sign of just how drastic the changeover has been. With Stewart, Letterman, and Leno all now retired, even Fallon is practically the old guard, when five years ago he was an upstart and late-night shows were actively resistant to putting clips on YouTube for fear of lost revenue. These days, those page views can help pay a star’s salary.

Late-night hosts are like Supreme Court justices: Once appointed, they can be on the bench for decades, so when there’s turnover, the changes can feel drastic. Watching one of Corden’s videos, I’m reminded of the comedian Andy Kindler’s keynote address at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival, a satirical stock-taking that’s become an annual tradition in the industry. “You’ve gotta be able to do a potato-sack race with Cameron Diaz,” he joked in 2015, bemoaning the brave new world of celeb-friendly late night. There probably are only more sack races to come.

Most Popular

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.